Dances with Scorpions For Adrenalized Situational Awareness Training

Only a couple hours after the sun went down, I was celebrating the launch of a somewhat sophisticated attempt at just building a very foundational video game. I was enjoying one of the first very warm nights after a very hot day since the winter and as I like to do, enjoy some what now is a rosemary infused mead beverage that is the new national beverage of my land from here until further notice. I’m gonna have to do some research on it, but it’s having some amazing effects on my dream life and my sleep life, having a glass of mead at the end of the day and earning it by putting in long shifts of coding. Sometimes when the summer gets really hot, that glass of mead every night, it’s the only thing they can get me to sleep, because it’s almost too hot to fall asleep. But luckily it has not turned into a monster and taken over my life, I keep it in moderation. I hate nausea. I hate the spins, I drink a ratio of two or three to one water to alcoholic beverage to keep the hydration level up. It’s worked out well for me, I don’t let myself get really tipsy. I just get into the zone of feeling emotions more deeply. I don’t get myself drunk but I’m definitely more on a sentimental not aggressive type of relationship with this medicine. I got a little bit of a dance floor environment going on. That’s part of my wellness practice, combative dancing, martial arts, kung fu, yoga, ecstatic dance mix that gets expressed to ecstatic trance music. That’s what got me this far over a number of years. So as I’m doing that, obviously the martial arts spirit of it is that you’re not just failing around without purpose, but you’re actually doing maintenance work on rotation of the joints and moving chi and moving energy across the fulcrums and working on body mechanics and footwork and balance and all those patterns and drills. And, of course, situational awareness can never be drilled too much. So out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something in the shadows, scurrying. I’ve got to a point now where it’s not one hundred percent reliable, but it’s more keen than ever, anything out of the ordinary in my field of vision, I’ve become very attuned to even one little pixel out of the entire panoramic landscape of something flickering. I’ll want to identify with binoculars over yonder, whether it’s a friend or foe, or just, like the other day, one of those metallic mylar balloons, very out of the ordinary and catching light. So I have a little drill for identifying that. But being this remote and this exposed, those situational awareness antenna kind of grow themselves. So certainly this is earlier in the season for me to be concerned, typically, so far over the last couple of years, about scorpions. From my experience and from my research, it’s deeper in the hot summer nights that they’ll come out of the ground to be hunting. I’ve certainly had those encounters before. The only time I saw one during the day out here was when it got trapped in one of my soup cans that was out, and I had to escort it a safe distance away. That was my first encounter with these larger ones, they’re about the size of your hand, they have the span of that at full span. But it was unseasonably early, I saw it scurrying around in the corner of my eye, I immediately had that adrenalized spike and jumped onto my little mini deck and had to think about it. First, I grabbed one of my lights to follow it a bit and identify it from a safe distance. I went within a couple of feet to grab the light, then angled it and maneuvered in a way that I could identify it. I was still able to do this footwork that Bruce Lee teaches from fencing, galloping sideways footwork position to where I could get to safety. It was moving fast, and it had a bigger shadow than the other sort of faux scorpion, the camel spider that’s freaked me out before. It was surprising and shocking, no

Dances with Scorpions For Adrenalized Situational Awareness Training | 15